Stupid BOINC (or do I repeat myself?)

[zombie67]

I had to reboot a win7 machine running 7.2.23. When it came back up, all the projects that were set to NO NEW WORK, were changed to allow work. I have ~50 project attached, but only ~5 were set to allow work. So my queue was filled with all kinds of tasks I didn't want. Also, all the local settings were reset to default. For example, all the Activity settings were changed back to "...based on preferences".

I am not sure if this was a BOINC bug, or some other random windows issue. But good lord, what a mess! Good thing I caught it after only about 15 minutes.

[zombie67]

Update: The HD was full. Not sure how that happens on a dedicated cruncher, but there it is. I think it's time for a HD wipe and a clean OS install.

[DrPop]

Update: The HD was full. Not sure how that happens on a dedicated cruncher, but there it is. I think it's time for a HD wipe and a clean OS install.

Probably a good idea on the reinstall. Wonder what happened to reset it, that does seem kind of strange. Some kind of write cache error or something maybe?

[Beerdrinker]

Back in the old days at SETI, a fragmented harddrive could make WIN act up and cause so much mess, that you´d have to reboot...

I would try a defragmenter before anything else. Especially if it´s a dedicated cruncher.

[Slicker]

I seem to recall something about an issue with BOINC event log not clearing and it taking more and more space. That was a couple months ago and I don't recall if DA and company could reproduce the problem or not.

[John P. Myers]

You may also want to try Start button>>All Programs>>Accessories>>System Tools>>Disk Cleanup

Windows is nice enough to include a "you can delete this now" file with their updates which is read and acted upon by Disk Cleanup. It should get you some breathing room at least.

Everyone should do this, especially if your boot drive is an SSD

[Mumps]

I'd guess the full drive is the root of your problem. Because BOINC is constantly re-writing the client_state.xml file, it wouldn't surprise me if it filled the drive and went to copy the config, only to find it didn't have any space. So it happily wrote a config file with nothing in it. *BOOP* Back to defaults.

[shiva]

I had one do that, it would fill up the HD and nothing I would do but wipe it would work and then in a few months it was back full again. I ended up trashing the HD to fix it.

[zombie67]

This AM, I was able to make 1gb of space by deleting a bunch of driver files. Then I set BOINC to NNT so it would finish up all the work by the time I was ready to re-install this evening. So I go to try JPM's tip, just to see how much room it would create. But before running it, I wanted to see how much room was currently available, so I would know how well it worked after running. And what do I see? 30gb of free space now! Before running JPM's tip. WTF? Windows or BOINC had some temporary files that it cleaned up randomly? *sigh* Thanks for that, but WTF?

FWIW, JPM's tip cleared up another 6gb. Thanks!

[Mumps]

If you restart boinc, it copies it's log files over to a name to hold onto one rev back. So you may have cleared up the older one, and a restart cleared up the newer one as well.

10/17/2013  03:25 AM       304,515,858 stdoutdae.old
10/17/2013  05:24 AM       178,430,177 stdoutdae.txt

So, in this example, if I were to stop and restart boinc, the 178 Meg stdoutdae.txt would get copied over the 304 Meg stdoutdae.old and free up that 304 Meg. With a new, empty, stdoutdae.txt being created. If I'd restart boinc again quickly enough, the newer one would be smaller still than that ".old" and free up the difference in size between the 178 Meg and the new file size.

If you have a cc_config.xml with a lot of the logging options enabled, that log can grow pretty quickly.